Fort Hood Laid the Gun-Grabbers’ Arguments to Rest

We don’t need to debate whether disarming the law-abiding makes people safer. That issue has been settled repeatedly. Fort Hood alone was definitive:

Shouldn’t an army base be the last place where a terrorist should be able to shoot at people uninterrupted for 10 minutes? After all, an army base is filled with soldiers who carry guns, right? Unfortunately, that is not the case. Beginning in March 1993, under the Clinton administration, the army forbids military personnel from carrying their own personal firearms and mandates that “a credible and specific threat against [Department of the Army] personnel [exist] in that region” before military personnel “may be authorized to carry firearms for personal protection.”

Actually, many did know that there was a specific threat against personnel — namely the killer, who had publicly stated that non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats. But it would have been politically incorrect to acknowledge this threat. So,

The unarmed soldiers could do little more than cower as Major Nidal Malik Hasan stood on a desk and shot down into the cubicles in which his victims were trapped. Some behaved heroically, such as private first class Marquest Smith who repeatedly risked his life removing five soldiers and a civilian from the carnage. But, being unarmed, these soldiers were unable to stop Hasan’s attack.

It took 10 minutes to get a gun to the scene. Otherwise Hasan never would have racked up such a high body count. This is why Jared Loughner’s psycho spree was the only mass shooting to occur in the US since 1950 that did not take place in a gun-free zone.